Waiting To Exhale
by tashasfic
Summary: Taking on the world's problems at nineteen. Jottfriendship


**Waiting To Exhale**

**by**

**Tasha**

Disclaimer: The X-Men aren't mine.

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"You're breathing all wrong."

Her voice cut through his train of thought, as he sat in the living room, absorbed in a book. From the garden outside, voices floated in, and she could make out Kitty's high-pitched giggle, Rogue's huskier laugh and Bobby's boisterous snort of laughter.

"It's _breathing_. How could I be doing it wrong?"

"You have to fill your abdomen with air, before you fill your lungs; and you have to take deeper breaths," she added.

"And you know this because…?"

"I learnt it at the yoga class I'm taking. You should come sometime."

"Not really interested in Yoga, Jean," he said, turning the page without averting his gaze.

"You should come," she insisted. "It'll help you relax."

"I'm relaxed," he automatically protested, finally lowering his reading material.

"You're frowning even now."

"That's because of these completely ridiculous suggestions you keep giving me," he said, stretching his arms overhead.

Wordlessly, she walked up behind him, and placing her hands at the nape of his neck, began to slowly massage his shoulders, in an effort to loosen some of the knots in his back. He closed his eyes and craned his neck forward for a second, before letting it hang loose. Her hands rubbed his shoulders, instinctively feeling out the parts that were the stiffest.

"You carry too much tension," she said softly, her voice floating down to his ears, from behind the couch he was sitting in.

"Hmmm," he responded non-committaly, arching his back.

God, he loved the feel of her hands on him. They were soft, gentle, and still firm, as they pushed at his muscles through the light cotton of his shirt.

"How did you get so good at this?" he murmured.

"I took a course."

"On massages?" he asked disbelievingly, cocking an eye open.

"Aren't you glad that I did?" she asked in return, as her palms slid, almost seductively, over his upper back.

She moved her fingers to the sides, and he let out an involuntary whimper of protest, as she abandoned pummeling his broad shoulders, and moved onto pressing his triceps. The pads of her fingers, slightly rougher than the rest of her palm, from the finger painting and clay molding, she so often indulged in, pushed hard, occasionally brushing the sensitive skin of his neck. He rolled his head to the sides, as she reached out, loosening knots he hadn't known he had.

"You have to start letting the little things go."

"Who decides which things are the little ones?" he countered, almost as if thinking out loud.

"I guess that's something we each have to decide for ourselves," she replied, continuing her task.

"I don't know how!" he exclaimed suddenly, agitated like a petulant child. He turned around and grasped her hands in his larger ones. "How do you tell what's more important? Is it more important that I hide the fact that I'm a mutant, or that I use my powers to save a life, or that I stop the Brotherhood from destroying the school, or that I pass my next Physics exam…?"

She didn't answer, but ceased her massaging and wrapping her arms tightly around him from behind, rested her chin atop his head and tried to comfort her best friend. He had always been a pillar of strength to her and the rest, but now the pillar was crumbling. Under his concrete hard exterior, he was as soft as a pillar of salt; a mere mortal, not the son of any Greek God, no matter what his codename suggested.

She came to sit down next to him on the long sofa and pulled him towards her.

"Lie down," she commanded and he complied.

"How do you do it?" he asked, his head in her lap, as she gently ran her fingers through his thick, chestnut brown hair.

"Do what?"

"Deal with everything," he said, rolling onto his back and looking up at her. "Don't you ever want to give up? Just say that it's too much and let someone else pick up the slack?"

She was silent for a moment before admitting what she would have admitted to no one else, "Sometimes."

"So how do you deal?"

"I take time out. I sleep my recommended twelve hours a day, drink my eight glasses of water and always eat my vegetables," she replied, causing him to smile.

"And I take time out to relax," she added, a little more seriously now. "I take time out to breathe."

Her hand made gentle, comforting strokes along his clothed arm, causing an unexplainable drowsiness to come over him.

He lay there, head in her lap, her fingers of one hand entwined in his own, her other hand dancing over his arm, before he finally said with a hint of something like regret in his voice, "I can't relax. I don't know how."

"Just stop worrying, Scott. The world wont stop if you go to sleep one Sunday afternoon, or forget to stock the fridge with more soda, or ask Logan to let you off from a danger-room session once in a while. You're only nineteen. You can't carry the weight of the world, you're not Atlas… and even _he_ shrugged once in a while," she said, nodding at his discarded Ayn Rand.

He held tightly onto her hand, squeezing it with his own.

"Just relax," she repeated softly. "Learn how to breathe."

He couldn't change the world, he couldn't influence the ages of man, but for a moment, he lay there, sheltered in the arms of the person he loved and trusted above all others and parted his lips and allowed himself to breathe; _just breathe_.

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Feedback is, as always, loved and appreciated.


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